Anyway, the first game in the franchise came out in 2007, and woah nelly did everything change as a result. Four mainstream games, a handful of mobile games, countless comics, novels, and even an animated movie resulted. Love it, hate it, Mass Effect had a tremendous effect on RPG gaming, and how it could show us characters and worlds we'd never encountered before. Not to mention how the player could interact with them and change things based on those interactions and decisions.